Doubleday and Darwin

As I sat in my high school math class one day, my teacher asked a question that I doubt will find a consensus opinion in my lifetime: “Was math invented or was it discovered?” To this day, I still scratch my head.

I (Doug Glanville, baseball player) was discovered — several years after that math class, but well before the phone rang a couple of minutes after six on an evening in June 1991. My junior year of college had just ended and I knew that the closer it rang to 6:00 p.m., the higher I was in the annual amateur baseball draft. And in draft terms, higher means better.

At the other end of the line was a representative of the Chicago Cubs. He congratulated me and told me the good news: his organization had selected me as their first choice in the draft. It turned out that only 11 players in the country had been selected before me, so I was in good company.

It was also a relief. Scouts representing all the major league teams had been watching me like a hawk since my junior year in high school. Now they were trying to sift through an endless field of high school, college and international players. The scouts were responsible for evaluating the talent and helping their organizations make the best choices. Heads could roll if the wrong decisions were made based on their advice.

Being part of this elite group of players had made my sophomore year at Penn sheer madness. What used to be a simple game of baseball turned into a daily on-field interview. The spectacle included TV cameras that taped my every move, a sea of media representatives often asking personal questions and sports agents trying to find a way to get close to me without breaking any N.C.A.A. rules. And, somehow, I had to figure out how to be an engineering student at the same time.

One superagent took the time to explain why I should ask for three times the market rate for my signing bonus. He made the compelling argument that, since I would be forgoing the use of an Ivy League engineering degree, the team that chose me should compensate me for my lost wages. He made it clear that the sum of this compensation and a little extra should make up my total bonus. He made his case for about five hours. On paper, it made a lot of sense.

With all of this attention, I started to ask myself, What do I have as a player that no one else has that’s putting me under this microscope?

The quantifiable answer seemed straightforward. Most of it could be measured using a stopwatch or a radar gun: I could run, I could catch, I could throw and I could put a round bat on a round ball with accuracy. But even I understood that my ability to succeed at the next level of baseball would be predicated on a lot more than numbers.

What would my math teacher say? No one would argue that my ability was discovered. Somewhere, someone saw something in me while I was playing this game and that something met the scouting community’s criteria for a newly unearthed treasure.

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As I rose in the ranks, I was still capable of being noticed — I was discoverable — and as long as that was happening, I could still wear the uniform and get paid to do it. It was often described as a gift or a talent, especially since it was wrapped up neatly in a profession that is popular, yet rare and unusual.

But humility reminded me that there are rules by which this game is played. Rules that, when changed, can quickly turn a natural into an unnatural. And if you change just one — the length from the plate to the mound, the number of strikes and balls, or even something much less significant — the landscape of the game changes. And with it changes that group of people who could be deemed “standout” performers in the game.

Imagine, for instance, if they eliminated the fences and made the distance between bases 75 feet instead of 90 feet. Home run hitters would be marginalized and speed would become a dominant force. Who knows? If I had played under those modifications, I might have been able to call this column “Reflections of a Hall of Fame Legend.”

Change in the game is inevitable. Some of it comes from amendments to the rule book by the powers that be, some is evolutionary. Either way, some players have the ability to fit right into whatever the current system may be, others require just a little more work to remain high achievers . . . and others just get phased out.

I recall one year, the “slide step” came to be as pitchers began to crack down on would-be base stealers. Rickey Henderson, Vince Coleman, Ron LeFlore were examples of players who swiped 100 or more bases in a season and ran teams out of house and home. The “slide step” was a key adjustment that pitchers made to cut into the running game. It was a way to “quick pitch” to home to prevent base runners from having the time to steal a base, by departing from the big-leg-kick wind-up to deliver the pitch. Instead, they would barely lift the leg and slide their body towards home plate, cutting off seconds on their delivery time. Suddenly a team’s ability to change a game’s dynamic by stealing a base was out the door right along with those players whose game depended on speed.

Another year the league tried to raise the strike zone. According to the rule book, the top of the strike zone is at the batter’s letters (the team name across his chest). But in practice, the entire zone had deflated over time, favoring low-ball hitters. A high-ball hitter like myself would have enjoyed more success with a higher zone since lower-zone pitches (knees and below) would not have been called strikes. In effect, this would have helped sustain my career as a hitter who didn’t usually get good results when swinging at low pitches. Unfortunately for me, the experiment failed within months, stalling out because it asked experienced umpires to ignore their instinct for what a strike zone is.

These rules are rules of invention, crafted and re-crafted over time for reasons that range from accommodating advertising time to preventing injury. For instance, “speed up” rules were brought in to move the game along more quickly and to compete with faster-paced basketball and football: it was decided that a hitter and a pitcher would have a limited amount of time to procrastinate before beginning their face-off. Similarly, when batters began to suffer too many head injuries, helmets became a requirement.

There are quantifiable skills that can make someone naturally compatible with the rules of the game, but it’s almost more important to be adaptable. Baseball can update pretty dramatically for a National Pastime. It has the ability to stay both classic and current, without contradiction. On the table of baseball rule changes for late this season is the instant replay, intended to help umpires on difficult home run calls. In the end, if it’s added to the rule book, the game will go on; players — and umpires — who don’t adapt won’t.

As the game changes, what is deemed “talent” changes right along with it. A player is discovered only in the shadow of these rules — rules that were invented and that have matured over time.

If I were to make my baseball experience the basis of answering the question about discovery vs. invention posed by my high school math teacher, I’d say that math was discovered . . . through the lens of our invention.